to watch them likewise, and took a pleasure in the sight. Their
meetings, their partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes
of converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and previously, as he
remembered, he had never sustained a conversation of any length with
composure and the beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds, to
which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for Elizabeth's dowry, he
signed over to his dear girl gladly, and came out with the confession to
her ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised his fortune.
She shrugged she had left off pulling him this way and that, so his
chains were enjoyable, and he said to himself: 'If ever she should in the
dead of night want a man to defend her!' He mentioned it to Reginald,
who had been the repository of Elizabeth's lamentations about her father
being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived a scheme for
causing his aunt's great bell to be rung at midnight, which would
certainly have led to a dramatic issue and the happy re-establishment of
our masculine ascendancy at the close of this history. But he forgot it
in his bridegroom's delight, until he was making his miserable official
speech at the wedding-breakfast, and set Elizabeth winking over a tear.
As she stood in the hall ready to depart, a great van was observed in the
road at the gates of Douro Lodge; and this, the men in custody declared
to contain the goods and knick-knacks of the people who had taken the
house furnished for a year, and were coming in that very afternoon.

'I remember, I say now I remember, I had a notice,' the General said
cheerily to his troubled daughter.

'But where are you to go, papa?' the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.

'I shall get employment of some sort,' said he. 'I was saying I want it,
I need it, I require it.'